Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (4 page)

Naturally, there was criticism over his column. Those who wanted him to slam the league over whatever was the issue du
jour were disappointed, but slamming had never been his personality. He has always been a team player when it came to the overall league, as well as when it came to whatever team he was on, and while he might prod and suggest, he was loath to condemn.

The criticism came my way, too, one journalist charging I was somehow in a conflict of interest in doing the column. It seemed a strange charge, given that virtually all newspapers have from time to time featured columns written by staff members that appear under the byline of a well-known athlete. Even the paper that threw up this charge had been doing it with a well-known Canadian golfer, the column ghostwritten by staff. I was a staff writer assigned by my editor and publisher to help out on the column. And not only did I not receive a single extra penny for doing so, I actually
lost
on the deal, given that for a year I had to give up a column of my own each week in order to produce Gretzky's.

It was, in fact, my second experience at ghostwriting, the first coming way back in 1973 when I was just beginning my journalism career at
Maclean's
magazine. In the months following the 1972 Summit Series, the young goaltender in that epic battle, Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens, was approached to put his name to an article on his experiences, and as I was the only staffer with a keen interest in the game, I was assigned to be Ken's “ghost.” The Cornell graduate and law student had kept copious notes, some dictated, some scribbled, and his thoughts filled a couple of red binders that he passed on to me to see what might be made of the musings. I was impressed. I took the notes, wrote one version of an article, and he took my version and returned it to me, rewritten. I went to the editor, Peter C. Newman, and suggested that Ken was a strong enough writer that he didn't really need a ghost, but rather an editor who might guide him. Newman agreed, and Ken and I set to work on what would become his first-ever published work.

We became great friends during the experience and, once it was done with, I talked to Ken about one day turning his attention to
a book on hockey. We spoke on and off about the idea for years, and Ken kept up his note taking as he and his Montreal team seemed to win Stanley Cup after Stanley Cup. I was eventually able to connect him and Douglas Gibson, the young publisher of Macmillan, with whom I was discussing a work of fiction. More years and many more discussions passed until 1983, when Doug simultaneously published my work of hockey fiction,
The Last Season
, and Ken's non-fiction epic,
The Game
, possibly the best book on sport ever written by an athlete. Ken's book absolutely swamped mine in sales and attention, but I was proud then, and remain so, to have been a small contributor to what stands as a major work in sports literature. The ghost who wasn't required.

Halfway through my year of working with Wayne Gretzky, the
American Journalism Review
even took notice and published a short piece entitled “Ghostwriting for The Great One.” The
National Post
column had been picked up by United Feature Syndicate and was appearing increasingly around the United States. When I first heard about the piece, I figured it would be another attack. But it was nothing.

Writer Sean Mussenden fingered the ghostwriter by name but rather surprisingly added that
The Washington Post
had also tagged me “the closest thing there is to a poet laureate of Canadian hockey.” The article quoted one journalism professor saying he believed any ghostwritten article should “disclose” the ghostwriter with a credit at the end, but
National Post
sports editor Graham Parley said this was hardly necessary, as it was quite well known that I was the ghost. In fact, Gretzky himself often joked about it and would call me his “ghost” on the few occasions we bumped into each other that 1999–2000 season in which the column ran. “The Great One,” Mussenden concluded in his very mild piece, “whom
National Post
columnist Cam Cole recently described as being harder ‘to get an audience with [than] the Dalai Lama,' could not be reached for comment.”

—

At the end of the 2000 Stanley Cup finals—New Jersey Devils defeating the Dallas Stars in six games—the Wayne Gretzky column “retired” for the summer, never to appear again.

He was getting increasingly involved in the game again—first as executive director of Team Canada heading into the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, where Canada won its first gold medal in men's hockey in half a century, then as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes.

I still have that last column. He was talking about the devastating check laid on Eric Lindros by Scott Stevens during an earlier playoff round between Stevens' Devils and Lindros's Philadelphia Flyers. Lindros was left with a concussion that, ultimately, would play a role in his early retirement from the game he had, for a very short while, dominated.

He argued that “clean” hits or “dirty” hits were not the issue here, that all that matters is the health of the players. He advised changes in equipment and called for better testing and evaluation to understand just how severe the concussion threat is to the game. “My fear, my real concern,” Gretzky wrote, “is that we are just scratching the surface. We're still a long way from getting a good handle on what concussion is and how it can be prevented, and yet we also have to be moving as quickly as possible to find a remedy for this very real threat to the game.”

Sounds like a strong stance to me.

Just think, if the NHL and NHL Players' Association had only moved on this issue “as quickly as possible to find a remedy,” perhaps today's concerns over headhunting and the threat to the careers of the likes of Sidney Crosby would not be an issue.

Rather prescient and powerful, Columnist Gretzky, if I do say so myself.

THE NATIONAL GAME

H
ockey has no founding father or mother or identifiable moment of birth. It was invented in the imagination and is reinvented every day from early fall on in the backyards and—where still permitted—side streets of this hockey-mad country.

As the National Hockey League returns to the ice on Thursday, this much is undeniable: Hockey is Canada's game. There is nothing to be gained by pointing out that a Mesopotamian tablet dating from the third millennium
BC
makes reference to men using wickedly curved sticks—apparently not illegal in those days—to propel a wooden ring over the dirt. There is no ear here for the argument that Pieter Bruegel's
Hunters in the Snow
, painted in 1565, appears to contain a game of shinny in the background. Nor do we really much care about the more localized claims that the game was first played in the Far North by the men on the Franklin expedition, and if not there then on a pond near Windsor, Nova Scotia, or if not there then at Kingston, Ontario, or even that there are newspaper
clips to prove that the first organized game took place in Montreal.

Soccer might claim more numbers, but hockey leads, as it always has, in nightly dreams and daily conversation. The grip this “national drama”—Morley Callaghan's phrase—has on people is difficult to explain to those who did not grow up in its grasp or, as happens increasingly these days, came to embrace the game as they and, in particular, their children came to terms with a new climate.

Lester Pearson tried to convey this sense in 1939 when the future prime minister of Canada told an audience in London, England: “It is perhaps fitting that this fastest of all games has become almost as much of a national symbol as the maple leaf or the beaver. Most young Canadians, in fact, are born with skates on their feet rather than with silver spoons in their mouths.”

Hockey had to be Canada's game. Had Canada invented baseball instead, players would have frozen to death between pitches. “In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane wrote many years ago, “hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

Very soon after Kidd and Macfarlane published their book on hockey, however, something happened to the national game. It was called the 1972 Summit Series.

The famous series is generally hailed as Canada's greatest victory on ice—Paul Henderson's dramatic goal surely the “singular moment in time” for generations of Canadians who can recall not only where they were but what they were wearing. The remarkable comeback in Moscow by the spunky Canadians launched a celebration that had as much, if not more, to do with relief as it did with triumph. Heading into the eight-game series—supposedly a friendly exhibition—the Soviets had not been given a chance. They had no goaltending. They had no shots. They had no coaching. Canada would probably sweep the series because hockey is Canada's game. When Henderson scored that final goal, it meant that Canada
had won by the narrowest of margins imaginable—a single goal scored with only thirty-four seconds left in the final game.

“When the country's celebration ended,” Ken Dryden and I wrote in
Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada
back in 1989, “the new day looked different. A lot had happened in the twenty-seven days since the first game in Montreal. A symbol, something about us, that we had always taken as self-evident, had been rocked. Our innocence, our confidence and enthusiasm, our urge to jump into the world's deep water—we had changed.”

This lack of confidence, so often buried under bravado, would rise and fall for decades following the 1972 series. The 3–3 tie between the Soviet Red Army and the Montreal Canadiens on New Year's Eve, 1975, would be spoken of as “the greatest game ever played,” yet if that were true—and many still believe it was—then it meant that the Russian robots had risen to a level equal with the very best of Canadian hockey. And if the Russians were coming, how soon the Americans?

Outsiders could still be beaten by Canadian players in Canada Cups or in NHL exhibitions, but too often the difference maker would be brawn (as when the Philadelphia Flyers pummelled the Red Army back into the dressing room in early 1976) or, as it was so often said, heart—despite medical proof that Russians, Swedes, Finns and Czechs all got their blood from a similar pump.

Canada had entered an uneasy time with its own game. Every loss, no matter how close it might be—the 1981 Canada Cup, Rendez-Vous '87, various world championships and junior championships—seemed to cause another jolt of identity angst. Having wished for a century or more that the world would appreciate the game that Canada had given it, many Canadians seemed unable to accept that the game had indeed been taken up by others and that others could play it.

This anxiety came to a crisis point as the game entered its second century. Canadians had always believed that if only NHLers were allowed to participate in the Olympics, world dominance would
be automatic. When it happened in 1998, and the Canadian men's team failed even to win a medal, the blow to national pride was devastating. That year also saw the beginning of seven consecutive world junior championships in which the best hockey country in the world could not prove itself best.

By 2002, in Salt Lake City, this growing national anguish was expressed perfectly by the country's greatest player, Wayne Gretzky, when he told a startled media gathering that “the whole world wants us to lose.”

A few days later, however, the whole world (at least the small world that gives a damn about hockey) saw Canada win, and not only the men's gold medal but the women's as well.

In retrospect, the self-doubt and anxiety played an important role. Canada began questioning its own sense of superiority in the 1990s—never so much as at the 1999 Open Ice Summit, which could basically be summed up in three words: What went wrong?

To the great credit of those who have a say in shaping the way the game is played as well as those who play the game—from Hockey Canada down to the smallest local minor hockey organization—everything from coaching to skill level was re-examined and, often, reconsidered. You would have to be naive and foolish to call it perfect, but there can be no doubt that the game is in better shape in Canada today than it has been for decades. The 2010 hockey summit held in Toronto this last summer seemed oddly unpressing, almost unnecessary.

Canada is once again comfortable in its hockey skin.

The men and women won gold in Vancouver. If the juniors don't win gold, they at least play for it. Young Canadians such as Sidney Crosby (captain of the 2009 Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins), Jonathan Toews (captain of the 2010 Stanley Cup–winning Chicago Blackhawks) and the two top draft picks of the 2010 draft, Taylor Hall of the Edmonton Oilers and Tyler Seguin of the Boston Bruins, are all … Canadian.